What is the purpose of using cURL in PHP and how does it differ from other methods of retrieving website content?

cURL in PHP is used to retrieve website content programmatically. It allows you to make HTTP requests to a server and retrieve the response, which can be useful for tasks like fetching data from APIs or scraping web pages. cURL is more flexible and powerful than other methods like file_get_contents() or fopen() because it supports various protocols, authentication methods, and custom headers. 

<?php
// Initialize cURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set the URL to fetch
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.example.com');

// Set options for cURL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Execute cURL session and store the response
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Close cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Output the retrieved content
echo $response;
?>

Keywords

cURL PHP website content retrieval methods

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